The insurance issue was addressed partly through the intervention of the MIA and partly through Lloyd’s of London, which agreed to insure the boycott’s cars when American companies canceled. This is a small detail, but it illustrates how the boycott’s success required problem-solving at multiple levels simultaneously.
The women who organized the carpool pickup points and the schedules and the communications — whose names are not the names most associated with the boycott — were doing work that was essential to the boycott’s survival. Jo Ann Robinson was among them. Many others whose names did not enter the historical record were doing the same.
## The City’s Attempts to Break the Boycott
The city of Montgomery and the Montgomery City Lines did not accept the boycott passively. The white political and business establishment used multiple strategies to try to end the collective action.
Arrests were one tool. In February 1956, the city resurrected a rarely-used 1921 anti-boycott statute and used it to arrest more than eighty boycott leaders and participants, including King. The prosecutions were intended to impose legal costs on the leadership and to discourage participation. They did not work as intended; the arrests generated national press coverage and donations to the MIA from across the country.
Economic pressure was another tool. White employers threatened Black workers with job loss if they participated in the boycott. Some workers lost jobs. The MIA tried to maintain a fund to support workers who suffered economic retaliation, but the fund was never large enough to fully compensate for all losses.